I am the Chief Insights Officer for Forbes Media responsible for managing Forbes' Insights thought leadership research division, as well as the Forbes CMO Practice. I am the co-author of "Profitable Brilliance: How Professional Services Firms Become Thought Leaders" now available on Amazon http://amzn.to/OETmMz as the previously published "In the Line of Money: Branding Yourself Strategically to the Financial Elite" available on Amazon http://amzn.to/AuHRN9
Bruce H. Rogers is the co-author of the recently published book Profitable Brilliance: How Professional Service Firms Become Thought Leaders

Convercent CEO Breaks The Rules To Grow His Company

A series of Forbes Insights profiles of Thought Leaders changing the business landscape: Patrick Quinlan, Co-Founder and CEO of Convercent…

Know the rules and when to break them…

Those are the first words one sees on the home page of GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) company Convercent, which may appear unconventional for a firm that helps companies deal with the challenges of aligning employee behavior with corporate culture, mitigating risk and maintaining regulatory compliance. And it is. Yet breaking convention has been the very definition of the co-founder and CEO Patrick Quinlan who sits at the helm of this innovative software-as-a-service organization.

Patrick Quinlan, Co-Founder and CEO, Convercent

The Denver-based Convercent only launched on January 29 of this year, yet already has 350 customers in 130 countries across 12 industries. How? Quinlan and his fellow co-founders built and planned the company to grow and succeed from day one. They spent nine months developing a team and creating a product that was ready to go from the time they opened their doors. Convercent is the combination of Business Controls, Inc., a 10+ year leader in hotline and case management software and investigation, compliance and policy development consulting and Nebbiolo Ventures, a team of proven technology executives who help good companies scale to become great.

The Governance, Risk, and Compliance space has basically been without Thought Leadership for a decade since Sarbanes-Oxley. It’s often thought about in a few different segments: policy distribution and attestation, training distribution, and case management. Since launching in January, Convercent and Patrick have been pushing a new way to view this field. There is a lot at stake. “Worldwide, businesses will spend an estimated $12 Billion in fines as a result of compliance and governance issues,” says Quinlan. It’s a big and complicated business. Previously compliance, risk and governance were silo-ed operations with separate databases and processes. Convercent’s technology not only aggregates those functions under one umbrella but also promotes collaboration within the organization.

“It’s well past time to integrate the different components, “says Quinlan. ”That way if you are out of compliance, you can look at what training employees have been through, and fix problems before they occur.” Patrick knows that managing the bad in GRC is just one part of a continuum that includes fortifying the good. “Compliance officers are in the bad news business” says Patrick. “They can now be more pro-active and triangulate information to help companies get out in front of issues like bribery or sexual harassment.”

Think of companies such as Google and Whole Foods. Values and ethics aren’t subheads in a handbook for these companies, they’re the backbone of the company. Patrick and Convercent are rethinking how to align a company’s values with their policies and training. It’s a new world of business–a world of transparency and mobility, within and between companies, customers and employees. In this world, governance, risk prevention and compliance (GRC) has become especially complex, and it’s more challenging than ever to align corporate values with individual employee behavior–not to mention create positive business cultures.

Convercent is delivering the first software solution to modernize the way companies bring their values, policies and regulatory compliance activities together with a positive employee engagement experience to create thriving, risk-averse businesses. Their SaaS service works on a subscription model with per employee rates starting at $50 per year. “This is insanely beautiful stuff” is how Patrick refers to his company’s software code. “We don’t even create user manuals because the user interface is so intuitive,” says Patrick. But “our biggest challenge is educating the market.”

Prior to Convercent, Patrick served as CEO of Rivet Software, where in two years he took revenue from $1 million to $60 million–an increase that earned the company #60 overall placement on the 2011 Inc. 500 List, and #6 among software companies. But there is also nothing conventional about Patrick’s journey to successful entrepreneur and CEO. “I learned everything the hard way,” says Quinlan.

Raised in Germany where his father was stationed in the Army as a Colonel. His mother is a native German and Patrick spoke German for most of his childhood. His father moved the family back to the U.S. to Denver where Patrick went to school in the inner city. “ I learned a lot in the hallways of the inner city school,” says Patrick. He was not the best of students and later joined the Army which was one of the first steps in turning his life around.

“I came from the Army and served in Desert Storm,” says Quinlan. “The Army teaches you the discipline of mission and team work. You understand what hill is your mission. Not that you always understand how high the mountain is or how cold the journey may be,” further states Quinlan. The experience taught him that mission and teamwork are the keys to success and that you need an “A” team behind you in order to accomplish the mission. Being in combat though made him realize that the Army was not a career for him, however formative the experience may have been.

“My partner and I got here by failure” says Patrick. “You learn more from failure than you do success”. After the Army, he and his co-founder Barclay Friesen worked 7 years to build a company which became successful in many respects, but went bankrupt in October 2008 during the financial collapse. “It caused both of us to lose everything. We had to move back with our parents and start over” states Quinlan. “Four months later we were at Rivet Software.”

“We wanted to build this company our way,” says Patrick. Everyone on the executive team has the same salary and bonus plan. In fact, Patrick and his co-founders are true believers in the value of the team and equality. “Shortly after we launched the company, we took $1.2 million of the $10 million we raised in venture capital and offered everyone in the company full severance benefits and references if they wanted to take the money now and get out or stay and commit to being all in to create a great company. “ It was a big gamble. I didn’t even tell our investors about it,” says Quinlan. “But we didn’t lose anyone. It was also my biggest honor to have this kind of commitment from the team.”

What does the future hold for Quinlan and Convercent? “We want to continue to disrupt the market and to build the business with the most committed and devoted team dedicated to building great products and services for our clients,” says Quinlan. “The rest will take care of itself. We have no intention of building it to sell it. Though certainly an IPO is a future possibility. We build dreaming big.”

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